Rick Green: 0:08
Welcome to WallBuilders. Appreciate you joining us. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach, and I'm here with David Barton and Tim Barton, David's, America's premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. Tim Barton, of course, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. You can learn more about all of us at WallBuilders.com. Alright, guys, later in the program we've got Christin Bentley going to be with us. We're talking about the libraries in schools and how to identify and get rid of the junk, the nasty poison that they've been literally putting in elementary schools even, let alone middle schools and high schools. And of course, people are hearing about this because of the drag queen story hours and other things like that. But at the public schools you really do have to learn how to do this effectively, be able to go to the school boards, all of those things, and Christin's been doing this very effectively and she's going to talk to us about how you can audit those school libraries and get rid of these explicit books.

David Barton: 0:59
Yeah, this has really been a big issue in the last couple of years. You know, we saw kind of the school board thing come to public light with Loudoun County and Fairfax County about three, three and a half years ago and as parents have started digging into what was going on and finding their kids with the gender stuff etc. They got into libraries as well and I think the library thing now may be two, two and a half years of really being a really hot issue. And so in that period of time, with WallBuilders and all we do with legislators, we've seen a number of states focus on libraries, focus on library content, focus on trying to get age-appropriate stuff in the libraries. It's been really bad the stuff that has been in there, but parents have started looking to see what's there.

Tim Barton: 1:38
Well, and one of the challenges too is even navigating that thought of what is age-appropriate. What does that actually mean? Because you have a school board that when a parent comes and they'll read content from one of these approved books in the library right, approved for that age, it's just approved for middle school and they start reading it and you have the school board saying God, it's not appropriate, you can't read that. Here, one of the challenges is in this moral relativism of the culture we are living in, when you don't have an absolute standard of right and wrong, when you don't have an absolute standard of morality or even the idea of what human sexuality is and when it's appropriate to discuss it or not discuss it. And what is the role of the school, what's the role of the parent? It becomes very murky lines, and so one of the bigger battles I think we're seeing is of how we are determining what is age-appropriate, as we still live in this crazy upside-down world where teachers are saying that if some kid in elementary school, right, third or fourth grade, wants to come to school and they want to change their gender, they're going to help provide them with clothes and they'll call them by different name and different pronouns. They won't let their parent know. But if this kid has a headache and needs to take some medicine, they've got to call the parent before we can do something as drastic as giving this kid something that might help a headache or whatever the case might be. This is the upside-down world we are living in and this is where I think one of the reasons that we so often at WallBuilders will point people back to the Bible. Why does it matter so much? Why do the founding fathers rely on the Bible more than any other source? When you study their writings, no source was more heavily relied upon or more heavily quoted than the Bible, because this was the foundation of morality for the founding fathers where they had so many disagreements. John Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson in I believe it was 1813, where he said the general principles upon which the fathers achieved independence. They were the general principles of Christianity. It was the common ground they found to come together. And as we're trying to navigate in culture, well, how are we going to determine right and wrong? What standard are we going to use? And I understand saying that the Bible should be our absolute standard. I believe that is correct. I also get that. That's going to be a tough conversation. Going to a school board and saying we're going to follow the standards of the Bible. I think we have to be strategic in how we have that conversation. But I would challenge anybody. You will not find a better moral teacher than Jesus or better moral teachings than those found in the Gospels, and if we're trying to determine standards of right and wrong, there is no better standard than the Bible.

David Barton: 4:14
And part of this. Tim, as you said, the Bible is our standard and this really illustrates a very clear worldview conflict over this issue. One of the things I was very surprised to learn maybe five, six years ago, when queer studies was a big thing and it was all over the college campuses is what they're teaching on that side is that you are a sexual being from the time you are born, from the time you are one minute old, you are a sexual being and that's what drives your life and so for them. Sex is the only thing that drives you and therefore we need to be teaching about it when you're in K-4 or K-5, k-6. We need to be showing all the stuff that goes with sexuality and that's a whole different worldview from what we've got that the children in us, that there is age-appropriate stuff, and that's part of the conflict we see as a conflict between worldviews, quite frankly.

Tim Barton: 5:01
And also worth noting that a lot of that ideology was taught and promoted by Alfred Kinsey, and Alfred Kinsey's research was what people use to say. See, this is what we know. But for anybody that's paid attention, alfred Kinsey did his research with prostitutes and sexual predators, so it was like he was studying normal Americans, seeing what is the normal sexual behavior of a well-grounded, moral person. He literally was taking his measurements from prostitutes and sexual predators, from pedophiles, and saying well, here's the way people operate sexually. That is totally incorrect. And yet that is still the basis for what so much of this conversation is and, as you mentioned, because that is the basis of a worldview. Now, as we are saying all of this, the good news is there are people who have found ways to go into school libraries and review the books that are there, identify where the problem books are that are clearly crossing sexual boundary lines that should not be crossed, certainly not at these young ages and definitely not by a school. And if you are a parent going in, I want to make a difference. What can I do? This is a great conversation for you to listen to, to hear some ideas of how can you get involved, what can you do? How can you take a stand to make sure we're protecting the innocence of some of these kids?

David Barton: 6:23
As soon as she covers this she's covering specifically. There was a law recently passed in Texas that very specifically gave parents all sorts of tools that they can use in this area, because we've got lots of fights in Texas. So, while she's talking about a Texas specific law, what is in that law is also available to every parent, even if you haven't passed this law, because it's based on legal standing, these legal standards so she talks about provisions of that law understand that this applies to everybody. This is something everybody can take and do in their school districts. They have the legal capability. We've been winning cases on this. Our side has. We have the legal capability to do the things that are embodied in that Texas law. But Texas has done a great job in stepping up front and giving parents terrific tools to stop this nonsense. Christin Bentley special guest.

Rick Green: 7:07
Stay with us folks. You're listening to WallBuilders.

Tim Barton: 7:20
This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. In the early 1700s, the Reverend John Wise priests that all men were created equal, that taxation without representation was tyranny and that God's preferred form of government was the consent of the government. All of which is language recognizable on the Declaration of Independence. Why? Because in 1772, the Sons of Liberty, led by founders such as Sam Adams and John Hancock, reprinted and distributed the Reverend Wise's sermons. So four years later, much of the declaration reflected the language of those sermons by John Wise. In 1926, on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, president Cal McCoolage affirmed the thoughts in the Declaration can very largely be traced back to what John Wise was saying. Few today know that the Declaration was so strongly influenced by the Reverend John Wise. For more information on this and other stories, go to WallBuilders.com.

Rick Green: 8:18
Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us here on WallBuilders. Christin Bentley is with us and she is waging a I would say holy war, and it's a. It's an absolutely a righteous war to clean up our school libraries, and she started here in Texas, but now people all over the country are following suit. Christin, thanks for what you're doing and thanks for keeping us updated here on WallBuilders.

Christin Bentley: 8:36
Thank you. Thank you so much, and it's great to be on the show.

Rick Green: 8:40
Well, you got very fired up about this, thankfully, and you've awakened a lot of folks, and now you're teaching others how to get rid of these pornographic books and sexualizing books that are literally targeted at kids, and we started hearing a little bit about this. We've seen, you know, in social media, the viral videos where parents are getting up and reading this stuff at school board meetings and literally kicked out of the meetings for reading what they're allowing the kids to read. It's just crazy, but it's actually awakened a lot of people. So that's really my first question for you. You've kind of, for a little while, you've probably felt like you were out there on your own shouting in the wilderness. Are you starting to feel like people are rallying to the call?

Christin Bentley: 9:20
Yes, I would say. You know, I started on this probably about two years ago when we started to see parents across the country show up at school board meetings reading from the books. And I tell you what I live in a very conservative Christian area of the state and I went ahead and audited the school library where my son was attending public high school and I was shocked by what I found. I couldn't believe that my Christian conservative community had some of the worst books that we find in schools right here, you know, in Tyler, Texas, and so I did. At that time, you know, it was a lot harder to audit books because we didn't really have a curated list of books, we didn't have resources, and so we, so I had to. It took a lot longer, frankly, and but two years into this, at the state level in Texas, we've made a lot of gains, but it's an issue that is not going away, and so we see it seems like every month across the state and across the country at school board meetings, this is an issue that is coming up, and so and it's important and it's engaging a lot of parents and grandparents too, and even just community members. You know people that don't have children, yet they care about this issue.

Rick Green: 10:45
Yeah, because it's the kids, the kids at that local school, that are going to be the leaders of their community and get to influence what's going on in their community in the coming years as well. Why Christian is it? Is it that people other than the school employees or the school board have to be willing to step up and volunteer to do this? Like, why aren't they doing their job and why can't you just go to the school board and say, hey, get rid of the bad books? I mean, you're literally having to show them which ones to get rid of.

Christin Bentley: 11:14
Yeah, you know it's interesting because I think we see different actions, that different, you know, in different school boards or areas. I will tell you, in Tyler, Texas, our school board, our superintendent, they were really wonderful and it really didn't take much pressure to get them to remove the books that were sexually explicit and pervasively vulgar and just unfuitable for students. But it's not necessarily what we see in most school districts, including in Texas and across the country, and we're not seeing them overall be proactive. A lot of times I think that they just don't. You know, in our smaller school districts, our more rural areas, they just don't think that it's a problem there, they haven't really looked into it. They just kind of like me, when I started looking into my school, my son's school district, I didn't think I was going to find anything. And then what we also see to you is that they are really afraid of being sued. They don't think that they have the right or the ability to remove books and that is just simply not true.

Rick Green: 12:25
Talk about the legislative power behind this as well, because the legislature finally woke up to this. And what is HB 900 and this toolkit that you use?

Christin Bentley: 12:36
Well, hb 900 is the bill that passed in the 88th legislative session, the regular session in Texas, and what it does is it mandates new standards for Texas libraries or school libraries. So we didn't have any sort of mandated standards before this for Texas school libraries, and so that was one of the really significant parts of the bill. And what it does is it prohibits sexually explicit materials essentially from being in the school library, and it also makes it very clear that books that are pervasively vulgar and educationally unsuitable should also not be in there, and so there's also an enforcement mechanism in the bill that requires that vendors rate books and that, if they are selling books that are rated sexually explicit, that they lose their contracts to spell books to Texas schools. And so, you know, the Heritage Foundation came out at the end of the legislative session and called it model legislation for the rest of the country, and so we hope that other states will follow suit. It's one of those bills that, you know, only a large state really could have done it, and so we hope that other states will follow through. But what I did is I created a toolkit, an HB900 toolkit, and there are in the toolkit there are things that are specific to HB900 that it can absolutely be used for auditing across the country whether you have a state law that's prohibiting these books, you know now, or if that's something that in the state that y'all are working on. And this is a toolkit that can be used now in every single state to get books removed locally, at the local level.

Rick Green: 14:23
I love the fact there's actually teeth there. I mean, if you can hurt their pocketbook and prevent them from being able to sell to schools, that's the key. And it's way better than just being able to talk about it. Man, it makes some, it makes a response, so that's very I can see why Heritage would say it's a model for the rest of the nation. So to our listeners outside of Texas, what a great project for you to get on, not only for your local school, but to talk to your legislator about getting this passed in your state as well. And Christin, best website for folks to learn more about this is that the Substack Protect Childhood.

Christin Bentley: 14:58
Yes, it is, but if you just type in protectchildhoodorg, that will take you to the Substack, and the Substack has everything on there that you need for learning how to audit. It's really in most school districts across the country. It's very easy to audit the school library because their library catalogs are typically online and accessible to the public, and so there's a document on there that shows you how to do that or tells you how to do it, and then there's also a link on protectchildhoodorg that will take you to a list of books that I have curated that meet that standard of sexually explicit, pervasively vulgar and educationally unseedable.

Rick Green: 15:41
And are likely to be found. Those are the ones that are common to be found, so you can zero in and find those quickly, I bet.

Christin Bentley: 15:48
Yes, and I would say some more so than others. But yes, those are books that are commonly found. I will tell you, I'm giving these workshops across the state of Texas right now. Would love to extend them online to other states and play into do that. But I would say in rural districts we tend to find, on average, about 75 to 80 books that are on that list in the high schools and then in some of our smaller cities and larger cities upwards of 300. Wow, wow yeah, yeah, it's, it's unbelievable, and and mostly we find them in our, in our high schools, middle schools will find we'll usually find a handful, and then, but even sometimes, in our elementary schools.

Rick Green: 16:33
All I can think is mama bear, I'm telling you, this is incredible that you, that you Listen, the last two years and you got all these people that are out there paid to, you know, be involved in kind of this kind of stuff, and it's champs like you that that are making a big difference. So, christian, we're so thankful for you and, and I hope, people go check it out today and then, that's right, protect childhood org. So you don't have to remember protect childhood dot sub stack. Calm, that's too long. Protect childhood org. We'll take you right there and you can get those tools and also just keep up on what's going on out there. It's the reader act tool kit and and and do you know yet, Christin, are there any states that you're aware of that have started to model it, or are you know Bleeding the way on this as well?

Christin Bentley: 17:15
I haven't heard other states that are and that are modeling after the reader act quite yet, and I know that there are other states that are trying to address this problem Arkansas, you know they. They tried to address it in their legislative session at Kentucky, utah. There are a lot of states I know that are that are trying to tackle this and and I would just say to you know that you can Tackle this at the local level, although the state has a compelling interest to protect children from sexualization, and we want to see these band-aided standards and this is an issue that you can take up locally with your school board and and Really demand that they remove sexually explicit content from their school library and, if they don't, that you will remove them.

Rick Green: 18:01
I'm yes, yeah, like we said, yes, remove this or we remove you. That's exactly right. I think you probably found this person, you know. I think the reason the left had so much success over the last few decades in infiltrating the schools and getting this kind of junk in there and it's not just this, it's the Marxism, it's everything is because Very few people it's not that they had the majority, it was, you know very few people can make a huge difference because most people aren't involved and and they just are tireless and they did that for decades, scratching and claw and taking over this area of the culture. And what you have probably found is that even as an individual and people you've trained and that you talk to all the time in their community, one person can make a difference on on this issue. And just imagine if you, you know, rally a couple other people from your church or from your family or community or whatever. Just a handful of people Can make a massive difference on something like this. If you found that to be true, both for you personally and the people that you're talking to, oh, 100%.

Christin Bentley: 18:59
I mean, it really does just take one person to get the ball rolling and a handful of other people to start following. One of the things that I did during the legislative session is in Texas, as I did, a filthy book campaign, where I sent legislators one example of a filthy book every single day, a book report, and that was really important, because one of the things that we know is that the other side tries to paint a narrative that we are trying to ban books that relate to color diversity, that we're trying to ban books like To Kill a Mockingbird. Well, that is. There is nothing further from the truth, and what happens is when we educate people on what is actually in these books most reasonable people they are appalled by it, and so that only takes one person to do that kind of campaign, but what we find is when one person stands up, others are always ready to follow and lend their support.

Rick Green: 20:04
Amen.

Christin Bentley: 20:04
And so it's amazing what we can do and what moms and grandparents and, you know, dads can do, and especially at the local level.

Rick Green: 20:19
Yeah, absolutely Love it. This is how the system is supposed to work. But again, we sat on the sidelines for too long, allowed this to happen. We're turning that around. This is a good news program that folks should be excited about to know you can make a difference. Christian, thanks for setting the example, for getting the word out there, for equipping people, because that's the big deal. A lot of people are like I want to do something, but I don't know what to do. I don't want to have to figure this out myself. I mean, you basically are handing people an instruction manual on how to do this, and we'd love to see this happen in every single community, every single school district. So thanks for leading the way. Appreciate you very much and thanks for coming on WallBuilders today.

Christin Bentley: 20:54
Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you for having me and thank you for all that you do.

Rick Green: 20:59
Love it. That's Christian Bentley. Stay with us folks. We'll be right back with David hotsman and Tim Barton.

Tim Barton: 21:11
Hi, friends, this is Tim Barton of WallBuilders. This is a time when most Americans don't know much about American history, or even heroes of the faith, and I know Oftentimes for parents we're trying to find good content for our kids to read and if you remember, back to the Bible, to the book of Hebrews, it has the faith Hall of Fame where they outlined the leaders of faith that had gone before them. Well, this is something that, as Americans, we really want to go back and outline some of these heroes, not just of American history, but heroes of Christianity and our faith as well. I want to let you know about some biographical sketches we have available on our website. One is called the Courageous Leaders Collection, and this collection includes people like Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, George Washington Carver, Susanna Wesley, even the Wright brothers, and there's a second collection called Heroes of History, and this collection you'll read about people like Benjamin Franklin or Christopher Columbus, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Harriet Tubman, friends the list goes on and on. This is a great collection for your young person to have and read and it's a providential view of American and Christian history. This is available at WallBuilderscom that's www.WallBuilders.com.

Rick Green: 22:14
We're back on WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Chris and Bentley for joining us as well Hopefully they've been, tim. This will be one that a lot of our listeners can actually take action on. I know sometimes we talk about things they're happening in Congress or somewhere that maybe they don't feel like they have a lot of impact on that. This is one of those local issues that anyone and everyone can be a part of the solution.

David Barton: 22:32
Yeah, this is a really big one and she has some things that really need to be driven home, because she pointed out she's in a very conservative rural area of Texas and that conservative area and she talked about the fact that they're finding in these conservative rural areas 75 to 100 of these bad books, really Queer study kind of books for kids, as opposed to 300 in larger cities. But let's go back to that, that rule thing for a while, because even Texas is going through a fight right now at school choice and we can't get our rural legislators to really want to support school choice because they say, hey, the schools in the rural communities, they're fine, it's okay. Let me just point out that in Texas, in the rural communities, 81% of citizens vote for Republicans and conservatives in the rural communities. But in the rural communities of the teachers, when teachers give to political parties, 92% of the teachers who give and the rural communities give to Democrats. So you may think you're in a rural community with 81% of people voting conservative, but the teachers are not necessarily there. Doesn't mean every teacher is bad, but this is why even the rural districts are going to have this kind of bad stuff going on.

Tim Barton: 23:34
Well and it's worth learning when. When you look at some of what's happening, it's very easy for parents to think, hey, this is a problem. But I know other parents they're active there, involved and it's easy to think somebody else is going to take the leadership role on this and unfortunately what happens is oftentimes it drops to the cracks. I was in South Texas just a couple weeks ago with a congressman. He was in an event down there. I was down with the congressman there's some pastors meetings down there and he was explaining to the pastors and the the District where his son goes to school again a rural district and and he's friends, this congressman is friends with the leadership of that school and those is the principal for the years, decades and it was talking to the principal or just getting note the teachers and it's beginning of the school year and this congressman decided he would just go to the library and he was going to go through and read all the books that were there. He thought I'm just going to go see what's on the end cap, what books are they highlighting? And Some of the books that were being highlighted in his rural county, where it's at least 80% that are Christian and conservative in his rural county, the books on the end caps that were being highlighted by the librarian, where some of these books that we're encouraging this really overt sexual behavior and a A sexual lifestyle that is very much in conflict with the biblical morals that most of these parents want their kids to learn, and so he just took some pictures of it. When show the principal said hey, what are we doing? The principal said man, I had no idea those books in our library, I don't know why they're on the end caps, but the point is the congressman told the pastors. He said to me it's crazy that I flew back from Washington DC To take my son to school, to go meet his teachers, and that I was the one flying in from Washington DC. They had to go to the library and had to go Bring attention of these books to the principal. He said I would have thought that all of these parents could have done this, or some of these local pastors could, and this is where we would just Encourage you. Don't think that somebody else can solve this problem when the reality is God might be calling you to get involved and be the solution in your local area.

David Barton: 25:40
Winston said they're on the website. She's got a list of these books and also what you can do to find them in your libraries. A lot of libraries are online and it just takes somebody shining flashlight on this. Bring it to light once it comes to light. Communities don't support this. That's why we're seeing to change all over the nation, and so what Christin has done is really a good service for all of us, making this available so that we can all make a difference and, Tim, as you said, every single one of us needs to do this in our own community.

Rick Green: 26:06
Our folks out of time for today. Thanks so much for joining us on WallBuilders today. Be sure and check out again the website WallBuilders.com . Lots of great tools available for you there, but also the great place to make a contribution. Make an investment in freedom by donating today to WallBuilders allows us not only To do the radio program, reach more people with these truths every day, but also to equip and train pastors and legislators and teachers and young people. All the different things we're doing. Thanks for being a part of it. Make that donation today at WallBuilders.com. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders.